[Now that Trump has been indicted under RICO, let’s look at his
past Mafia ties. ]
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DONALD TRUMP, MOB BOSS — THEN AND NOW  
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David Corn

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_ Now that Trump has been indicted under RICO, let’s look at his
past Mafia ties. _

Donald Trump caricature, DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)

 

_EDITOR’S NOTE: __The below article first appeared in David
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In yet another historic indictment
[[link removed]], Donald
Trump was charged by an Atlanta prosecutor with essentially being a
mob boss.

With this expansive set of charges that accuses Trump and 18 others of
mounting a wide-ranging and illegal conspiracy to overturn the 2020
election—emphasizing actions taken to fraudulently reverse the
results in Georgia—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
declared Trump the head of a “criminal enterprise.” The first of
41 counts in the indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators
violated the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations Act, a law that has been used by local and federal
prosecutors—including defendant Rudy Giuliani, when he was a US
attorney in the 1980s—to pursue Mafia chieftains who were often able
to insulate themselves from the criminal deeds of their henchmen.
Given Trump’s past ties with mobsters—a significant piece of his
biography that has often been overlooked—the use of RICO has an
especially sharp resonance.

 

When Trump ran for president in 2016, I was one of the few reporters
who examined his shady record of organized crime connections
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his history of making false or contradictory statements about these
relations. As I noted then, “when asked about his links to the mob,
Trump has repeatedly made false comments and has contradicted
himself—to such a degree it seems he has flat-out lied about these
relationships, even when he was under oath.” I detailed several of
these instances—which have even greater relevance now that Trump is
the lead defendant in a RICO case. Let’s take a stroll down memory
lane.

* In 2007, Trump sued journalist Tim O’Brien for libel—asking for
$5 billion in damages—after O’Brien in his book _TrumpNation: The
Art of Being the Donald_ reported that Trump was no billionaire and
only worth between $100 million and $250 million. That book referenced
an already established fact: that in the early 1980s Trump began his
casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by leasing property owned
by Kenneth Shapiro and Daniel Sullivan. Shapiro, O’Brien wrote, was
a “street-level gangster with close ties to the Philadelphia mob,”
and Sullivan was a “Mafia associate, FBI informant and labor
negotiator.” (Trump also had obtained Sullivan’s assistance
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he had trouble with undocumented Polish workers who were demolishing
the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan to make way for Trump Tower.)

During a deposition for that libel case—which Trump would
lose—Trump was asked, “Have you ever before associated with
individuals you knew were associated with organized crime?” Trump,
who was testifying under oath, answered, “Not that I know of.” Yet
when O’Brien had interviewed Trump two years earlier, Trump had told
the journalist that he believed that Sullivan was mobbed up and “the
guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.” He also described Shapiro as a “mob
guy.”

Moreover, after New Jersey regulators in 1982 granted Trump a casino
license, they compelled him to buy the property that he had leased
from Shapiro and Sullivan because of their backgrounds. Shapiro later
told a federal grand jury that he had illegally funneled
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of dollars to the Atlantic City mayor on Trump’s behalf—a charge
Trump denied. So though Trump was well aware that Sullivan and Shapiro
were mobbed up, in that 2007 deposition he stated he had never
associated with persons with such ties.

* In 1999, when Trump was considering running for president as the
candidate of the Reform Party, he was interviewed on _Meet the
Press_ by Tim Russert, who asked Trump about his “relations with
members of organized crime.” Trump denied having any such
connections. He neglected to mention that he got his start in Atlantic
City via that business deal with Shapiro and Sullivan. Nor did he
refer to working with a cement company owned by Mafia captains and
with a mob-linked union official when he was building Trump Tower. Yet
eight months earlier—when Trump was not making moves to run for
president—he acknowledged that he had done business with organized
crime figures. Talking to the Associated Press, Trump remarked,
“Usually, I build buildings. I have to deal with the unions, the
mob, some of the roughest men you’ve ever seen in your life.”

* Trump also denied interacting with Robert LiButti, a famous horse
breeder and high-stakes gambler with ties to infamous Mafia boss John
Gotti. In 1991, the _Philadelphia Inquirer _asked Trump about his
connection to LiButti. At the time, New Jersey regulators were
investigating allegations that the Trump Plaza casino had repeatedly
removed women and Black people from craps tables after LiButti griped
about their presence while playing. “I have heard he is a high
roller, but if he was standing here in front of me, I wouldn’t know
what he looked like,” Trump told
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newspaper. And when _Yahoo News_ in 2016 asked Trump about this 1991
investigation, which resulted in a $200,000 fine, Trump answered,
“During the years I very successfully ran the casino business, I
knew many high rollers. I assume Mr. LiButti was one of them, but I
don’t recognize the name.”

Edith Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, had a different take. She
told _Yahoo News_ that Trump’s account was false and that he and
her father knew each well. “He’s a liar,” Creamer said. “Of
course he knew him. I flew in the [Trump] helicopter with [Trump’s
then-wife] Ivana and the kids. My dad flew it up and down [to Atlantic
City]. My 35th birthday party was at the Plaza and Donald was there.
After the party, we went on his boat, his big yacht. I like Trump, but
it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me.”

The _Yahoo News_ story by Michael Isikoff (my occasional co-author)
also reported that a 1991 book written by John O’Donnell, the former
president of the Trump Plaza casino, recounted a 1988 meeting between
Trump and LiButti aboard Trump’s private helicopter. On this flight,
according to O’Donnell, Trump discussed buying a racehorse for
$500,000 from LiButti. Isikoff also obtained the transcript of a
wiretapped meeting in 1990 between LiButti and a top Trump executive
in which LiButti made numerous references to his conversations with
Trump and described an occasion when Trump personally handed him a
check after he lost $350,000 at the craps table. (It was supposedly a
gift to keep LiButti happy so he would continue gambling at the Trump
Plaza.)

To _Yahoo News_, Trump claimed he did not even recognize LiButti’s
name. Yet a few months later he told
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Street Journal_, “LiButti was a high-roller in Atlantic City. I
found him to be a nice guy. But I had nothing to do with him.”

All these episodes establish a pattern: Trump associated with mobsters
and lied about these relationships. Yet Trump’s links to criminals
never became an issue during the 2016 campaign or subsequently. (No
coincidence, Trump’s longtime attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn, who
died in 1986, was also a lawyer for such mobsters as Fat Tony Salerno,
Carmine Galante, and John Gotti.) Yes, the United States was led for
four years by a failed casino owner with ties to organized crime. And
Trump’s criminality in office was hardly shocking, as he often
behaved like a Mafiosa (_Nice little country you got there, President
Zelenskyy. You want more weapons from us? Well, I’m gonna need you
to do us this little favor._) Now Trump has been indicted the way a
mob boss gets nabbed. There is no telling how this case—or Trump’s
other criminal prosecutions—will play out. But this much is clear:
Willis has delivered one of the most poetic indictments in American
history.

_David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief and an on-air
analyst for MSNBC. He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff)
of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and
the Election of Donald Trump. He is the author of three New York Times
bestsellers, Showdown, Hubris (with Isikoff), and The Lies of
George W. Bush, as well as the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the
Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. For more of his
stories, click here [[link removed]].
He's also on Twitter
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* Donald Trump
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* RICO indictment
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* Mafia
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